The Spiderman Question
Anonymity and effective altruism
A couple of days ago I technically saved a guys life. It was not particularly exciting and it mainly consisted of me making sure he was breathing and not drowning for maybe 20 minutes. Just boring, inconvenient, and disgusting, because he was puking and spilling mucus everywhere. I came home and showered twice, and threw my clothes in the wash, and had a little adrenaline come-down getting the shakes. That’s about it.
It was not like a cool movie scene, and even though I later made myself laugh thinking “I wish this had happened in the summer so I could have been topless doing it, then it would have looked cool”, it really wouldn't have helped, only made it that much more absurd.
The normal reaction most people have to seeing a person in a crisis is just freezing. Everyone who watched me thought I was being a complete dick. It is not the average person’s instinct to get involved. And really, I’m not that much different – for all I know, the guy could be dead, he could have had internal bleeding in his brain and died seconds after I got tagged out by the paramedics, and I am never going to even bother to check. Although I don’t think so, they seemed pretty confident that things were under control. But they don’t know who I am and I am never going to see that guy again.
I’ve previously talked about how I think karma works, in that it’s not a “good boy/bad boy points” calculation, but rather that everything in nature tends towards equilibrium. If you do a “good deed”, that doesn't mean you “deserve” or “get a good deed in return”. It means you did violence upon Nature, and Nature, seeking equilibrium, will punish you. You interfered in a man’s path, his fate, and fate reprimands mere mortals transgressing against it. No good deed goes unpunished, but we must do them anyway, because we are in a war against death and every little bit counts. It’s a meatgrinder.
The purpose of moral action is not to be rewarded, if you want rewards then you should trick and lie and steal. “From those who have more will be given and from those who have not, they shall lose even that which they have”.
In the real world helping someone is just a traumatic experience you take on yourself, which everyone else thinks is annoying. The real reason spiderman has to hide his identity is that in the real world no one gives a shit, no one values human life, and the random onlookers just think you're being annoying. The only difference between us and the gore videos of Chinese people dying in factories and traffic with no one batting an eye, is the Chinese are more open about it. More blunt.
Your family doesn't give a shit, you can’t tell anyone about it because either they will think you are showing off, or they eyes will glace over and they will stare right through you until suddenly snapping back and changing the subject, because they can’t engage with anything that reminds them of the concept of death.
The concept of heroism is only really attractive without a victim. Victims muck the picture up. They puke and bleed and shit their pants, and do all kinds of disgusting things that drag you out of your idealized fantasy space and right back down in the pragmatic and real. I think the day someone invents a robot that changes babies is the day all parents stop loving their children, and that generation of children will become truly feral and Ragnarok-style eat their parents and destroy the world in a brutal massacre, because no one ever felt compassion for them.
I came home that night and before talking to people about it, I tried to just get my mind of things by taking in some Internet Content, and it so happened that the Discourse at the time was about “anonymity” - whether it is cowardly to hide your identity online, whether it is pathological, or whether perhaps its stupid to make yourself a target for political repression when you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
There is something to be said about it. Plato’s invisibility ring makes you brazen. But no more brazen that being in the crowd. The imp of the perverse that’s telling you you could get away with it is much stronger in a crowd than in private. In that respect, in terms of the internet, both the anons and the people posting under their own face and name are equally guilty, there is no real difference there. What emboldens people is not wearing a mask, but belonging to a crowd, into which one can disappear after doing whatever dastardly deed you were up to.
Likewise you can do terrible things in your own name, and be rewarded for it. Happens every day. We all like to complain about how unfair it is, when obviously unworthy people reap unreasonable rewards of various kinds, celebrities and talking heads. People don’t do bad stuff in secret, they do it in broad daylight. The emperors new clothes has proven to be a far more efficient way of concealing deceit than any cloak and dagger. If what you were doing was bad, you wouldn't be doing it so brazenly, so openly, right? Clearly, the man is innocent. It’s on tv, so it must be true.
What mister Peterson is asking for is for people to “stand out of the crowd” and not be herd animals. What he is wrong about is that he thinks hosting a jpg of your face on the global panopticon-server to more easily be identified by a drone one day, is a way of doing that.
He only perceives anons as being “the crowd”, a mob, when it really is just everyone. He thinks “standing out” and being a hero and taking action, rather than just freezing and staring like a deer in headlights, is equivalent with abandoning anonymity on the internet. The main point he is wrong on, is “the internet”.
Do you think people who post under their own name, and take the internet seriously, people who think about “how they look” online, if they saw a person getting hurt in front of them, would be more likely to help them, or to take out their phone and record them dying?
The reason spiderman is stuck in his dysfunctional misfortune week after week is that the real feat of valor is being yourself with the girl you like, and all the vigilantism and saving the world in the world, either by donning a costume or by Participating in the Discourse, is just a way to avoid that. “Effective altruism” (which incidentally is an extremely revealingly cynical name. You would never call it “effective” as a modifier if you believed in the conceptual validity of the concept), utilitarianism, these things are not ways to try aim at the Good – they are ways of avoiding the Good. They are not ways of serving the most Good possible, but ways to determine “what is the least amount I have do to, to qualify as good”. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, its not a big deal, you don’t have to cry about it.
Saving someone is boring. That’s the real thing. Every time I’ve been in a crisis situation, I’ve always been instantly struck with a deep calm, and an extremely pragmatic mindset. It’s just “oh okay, here’s a problem I have to deal with now, do x y z”, robotic, completely emotionless. It just feels like going to work. Cleaning, doing the dishes. Doing “heroic” stuff is boring, disgusting, and people think you're being a dick. It is not exciting and epic and colorful. It’s not even really scary. Only stories about it are. Only imagining it, is.
Talking to a cute girl, and realising that she has discovered something about who you really are? That is terrifying.
i'm glad you still found a way to show off what you did by posting this and creating a narrative in which you're superior
jk u did a good, dear andy/spidermang
(it's ok to feel good about it)
From my experience you're right. I've had to haul enough of my buds to the hospital after getting in drunk fistfights or falls down the stairs that it really does seem like more of a chore than some heroic stuff. That said when I look at the guys who did the same for me when I nearly died of a brain infection I can't help but feel the opposite way about them. I think the humble man's perception of himself is usually a lot lower than his friend's perception of him.